Month: April 2016

Have you ever wondered how futuristic email Apps would look like? Then one should go and have a look at this app which is a next generation email app. Inbox by Gmail is an application developed by Google which is basically like an outer layer to your Gmail Account.

It has a whole new design which is sleek, simple and fast. One of the main features is that it gives you the highlights of the mail without even physically opening the message. The attachments can be viewed and downloaded without opening the email. Everything is listed upfront on one screen which makes going through attachments a whole lot simpler! Otherwise it is a pain sometimes to open the email and search for an attachment. This saves a lot of time, hope many would agree on that! 🙂

The picture above shows a screenshot of a section of an email without opening it. You can see something known as “Submittal Form”. That is an attachment and that gets listed on the front. This can be viewed and downloaded without opening the email.

Bundles is another feature of this application. It groups similar emails together so that it can be dealt all at once. It is quite similar to the already existing ones called Updates and Social in Gmail in the sense that it groups similar emails together. But the difference lies in the presentation. All the emails which are grouped together in a bundle, can be glanced through be simply navigating through the arrow buttons. Emails are symbolized with a picture and few headlines, so that one could get a gist of what the email is all about.

This is a picture taken from the Inbox by Gmail which shows the details regarding a package that has been shipped. One need not open the email to find out the status of the package.

One could set Reminders which is positioned at the top of your Inbox to ensure that you are always seeing it! 😀 . After you have completed the task one could just click on the “Done” button and this card would get automatically transferred to the “Done” List.

For a person who is a travelholic, he/she might find it very useful. So, if one has booked multiple flights or trips for a month. All the Information gets displayed like this picture above. So one need not got through your tickets/ reservation to find out the time or the details of travel.

All the Purchases can be viewed in one Place under the “Purchases” Bundle. It gives you the tracking Information for each package without opening the email.

Another thing to note is apart from emails one could also save links too! So, if you like to view that website later, instead of bookmarking it on your browser, one could save it in Inbox and it gets grouped in the “Saved Bundle”.

Having said this, it is not that Gmail and “Inbox by Gmail” are two separate entities. You could go from Gmail to Inbox by Gmail or vice-versa just with a press of a button.

This is a screenshot which shows how this button appears on your Gmail Account once you have set up Inbox by Gmail. With a click of that button you get transferred to the Inbox App.

So, the bottomline is the content is the same on both Gmail and “Inbox by Gmail”. The key difference lies in the presentation. It’s upto a person’s tastes to choose which one he/she likes.

But please give it a try. It is available on Android and Ios Devices and it can be setup in the Desktop as well.

We all know that Chrome is a fast, simple and secure browser to use. It was Introduced in September 2008 and from then on has become one of the most popular browsers. According to recent findings it is claimed that 60.1% of the users worldwide use Chrome as their default web browser. It can be used on your Phone, Desktop and your tablet. And one could sync Information between these devices using your Gmail Account.

Recently Chrome Announced it’s 50th Version Update to it’s users. With the last previous updates, Chrome now no longer supports Windows XP, WIndows Vista, OS X 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8. Google Chrome claims that due to it’s autocomplete feature over 500 Billion Characters are not typed each month!

Well all of you would be waiting to know what the secret is? Right?? Now tell me what do you observe if a Page fails to load due to No Wifi or Internet Connection? You might see a page something like this.

This might be quite a frustrating page to look at Right?? Specially if you were working on something really Important. And then you possibly can’t do anything else and one would be bored to death waiting for the Internet Connection to come. Now carefully look at the Picture above. You would see an Image of a Dinosaur Right?? Now here is the catch, What happens if you press the Space Bar? The dinosaur begins to run and you begin to realize that you are playing a game!!

It basically falls in the category of Runner Games. In this game the Dinosaur runs and jumps over Obstacles. The Game ends when one it collides with an Obstacle.

This is a screenshot of a Game in Progress, with the dinosaur jumping over the Cacti. It is really a simple game to play, where you have to use only one key that is the “Spacebar” to jump over an Obstacle. Now who would have thought that there would be a game hidden in a browser?

To try this game out , either wait for your Internet Connection to get disconnected or manually disconnect it 😀 . Then load any website you want and you would get a page saying that “Unable to connect to the Internet” with a picture of a Dinosaur. Now Press the SpaceBar and you would see that the Game Begins. And then just use the space bar to jump over Obstacles. The longer you play, the higher would be the score. It is basically a survival game.

Now one would think that why did they choose to put a dinosaur out of the countless animals in this world. Well, Dinosaurs are Symbolic to the Pre-Historic age. And in this day and age if one does not have Internet Access it is termed as they are travelling back in time.

For the ones wondering what the dinosaur is, it is T-Rex which is an abbreviation for Tyrannosaurus Rex. This game came into existence with the Chrome 38 update way back in September 2014. And I bet many of you would still didn’t know the existence of the game which shows a well kept secret 🙂

Everybody has a TODO List. The tasks which we would like to complete in a day. Basically to keep yourself organized and to ensure that you are not missing any task which you have to complete. So How does one go about managing tasks? You might create your list in a Memo Book or in a Diary or use Sticky Notes and paste them in a place where you are more likely to visit at least once in a day! I know most people would put the Sticky Notes on the Fridge! That is one place one would definitely come visiting! XD

Well Jokes Apart, all these are good ways to manage your tasks. But, now there are “better” or more sophisticated ways for task management. In comes Trello, Trello is a popular productivity tool. It can not only be used to personally keep track of your tasks, but it can also be used in a workplace such as managing a project. One could put a list of tasks or objectives for a group and it could be shared between 2-3 people. It is a collaborative tool where one can add comments against each task assigned.

The good thing about Trello is it has got a simple but elegant Interface. It is organized into different Boards. Boards are basically the Projects or the Main Tasks one would like to create. Ana a Board can contain different lists. And a list in turn would contain a set of cards.

Now let’s take an example. The pic above is taken from the Official website of Trello. This is an example of Project Management. On the header is the Project Overview, this is the name of the Board. And this board contains two lists as shown. You have Priorities and Forecasted Projects. Each of these Lists contain a set of cards stacked on on top of the other. Priorities contain the list of priorities like Increasing the yearly conversion rate, analytics data etc. The Second List Contains User Research, Equipment Update etc. So, each of the cards on this list can be assigned to different people in the Project by the Project Manager.

Coming back to the TODO List Example. For a TODO List, you could simply create two Lists called- TODO and Done. And once you complete a task you could easily move it to the Done List. This is a very good feature in Trello. One can not only move cards between lists in a Board/ Project but also between different boards as well. And the good thing about it is, you could switch over from one Board onto the other seamlessly.

This is another Image taken from the Trello website demonstrating another Workflow.

Another Feature of Trello is one does not need to log onto the Application every time to see if there is any change in the Activity. You could get email notifications whenever someone assigns you a task or makes any changes to the Project. The next thing is one can easily trace Attachments or documents related to a Project or activity. It can be uploaded once on Trello and that’s it. This saves a lot of time as opposed to communication over emails. On emails, one would have to search through the emails to find the attachments which is such a pain.

Any Attachments to Trello could be taken from multiple sources like Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive as well. Recently Trello has added 16 new languages to the already existing 4 languages which it supports. It supports Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Czech, Dutch, Italian, Turkish, Thai, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. It already supported the following languages earlier-Portuguese, French, Spanish and German. Trello has launched third part Integrations with tools/ Applications such as Slack, Github and SalesForce.

Note Taking is one of the basic skills which we learn when we are in School. It is basically a way of assimilating the Information so that it can be used for future reference. We would have used notebooks and written things down. Early Computers had Note Taking ability. For Windows it is Notepad which still exists even now as a basic Text editor. And with the Mac it is TextEdit.

These editors were very purposeful back then when there was less multimedia and the Internet was not too popular. And the basic need was to just write simple notes. But times have changed and the Information we have right now is not only text but we have Audio and Video as well. People have been using Internet as their main source of Information. Earlier it used to be Britannica. I remember quite fondly when I was a child and during the “pre-Google days” when there was no means of getting Information quickly, the only way of getting to know things was using the Brittanica Encylopedia. It still exists even now. Those Interested can jump on this link http://www.britannica.com/

Now in case we have to search for a particular topic in Google, we would get a magnanimous amount of Information, since Google is known to Index a large number of web pages. So, now a person faces a problem of plenty situation. Since one would need to basically summarize or gather Important points from many different websites or web sources. Now one could copy and paste content from different sources and put it in Word or in Notepad. But, in this day and age we not only have content in the form of text, there are also videos like online tutorials which one would like to keep a track of. Word or Notepad will not be able to help you in this case, at best you could add a link to the Video.

Now Here Comes One Note. It is a sophisticated way of Note Taking which would put Notepad or any other text editor to shame. In One Note you could easily embed Videos of your choice and guess what?? view them while taking notes!! It is a new feature Introduced in the One Note 2016 edition. Apart from this you can write notes wherever you want in a page unlike in Word. It is like a sheet which could extend infinitely in height or width and one could scribble whatever he/she wants. You could draw figures, make notes and do many other things.

Here is a screenshot taken from one of the blogs for Microsoft Office which shows how a Youtube video is embedded in One Note

One Note is organized into a Notebook with different Sections. And Each Section has a time stamp. So if you are starting a new day for taking notes, you could open a new Section and it would automatically add the Date and Time of when you have started taking notes. It is Incredibly cool. There are many other features, but if I continue I could spend the whole day writing about it! The best advice I would give is to download the Application ASAP and explore it’s features. You would Love It! It comes pre-installed with Office. Even Mac Users can download this Application from the App Store. It Supports Android, IPhones and IPad’s too!I Phone users could download it from here https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-onenote-lists-photos/id410395246?mt=8

Google Calendar is a Calendar App which has been there for quite a while now. It came into existence about a decade ago. It released on April 13, 2006 as an Online Application for Calendars. And from then on it has grown to become one of the most popular Calendar Apps in the market.

The main requirement to use the Google Calendar is that you must have a Gmail Account. According to latest reports, it is made to believe that Gmail has about 1 Billion monthly Active Users! This means each of these users would have an access to the Calendar App. But whether they are using it or not is another story all together!

Google Calendar is known to import events automatically from your Gmail to your Calendar. And it can also sync other calendars on your phone. You can set reminders and To-Do tasks. This was all there, but there is one new feature which came out just about two days ago.

It is called Goals. Every one of us might be having some big or small goal which we would like to achieve. It might be learning a new skill or hobby, Loosing Weight/Exercise is quite a common goal. It is always good to have goal but sometimes we don’t stick to our goals and later on we forget about it. Google Calendar addresses this Issue.

It basically allows you to add a Goal of your choice and the App would take care of the rest. And the Calendar App would Intelligently add that event to your already existing schedule. The reason I mentioned “Intelligently” was that it would look at your calendar and see which times are you relatively free and then it would add that Goal to your calendar.

In a realistic scenario many times , even though we have scheduled to do something but due to various reasons we might not be able to do it at that point of time. Google Calendars understands this. There is an option to defer the event, in case you are not able to do your task at that point of time. The App automatically reschedules your event to the next preferred time.

In order to set a Goal one would have to follow these steps-

On the Calendar application, click on the “Plus” button on the lower right hand corner.

There would be 3 options-Goal, Reminder and Event. Select Goal.

Now you can choose what kind of Goal you would like to achieve. The Categories are-Exercise, Build a Skill, Family & Friends, Me time and Organise my life.

Once you select a category, it has sub categories. Choose the one which relates to your goal.

Then you would have to set the frequency-Once a week, Twice a week.

The length of the goal-15 minutes, 1 hour.

Then select what time of the day works best for you-Morning, Afternoon, Evening or Night.

And your Goal is Set!

So, in order to get the Goal feature in your phone just install the latest update of Google Calendars. This update released on April 14, 2016.

Have you ever observed that a file which you download from the Internet when opened goes into Protected Mode. This happens especially with Word and Excel files. You must have seen something like this appear on the top of your screen once you open the file.

This is a safety feature from the browser which by default sets a high level of security to all the websites. It disables pop ups and any JavaScript code which is running in the background. And it specifically sets a caution once you download files from the Internet since it can be prone to viruses.

Even though this feature is really good from a security point of view but sometimes it could be Irritating if one has to constantly click on Enable Editing once the files are downloaded from the sites you trust. In case you are downloading files from a source you trust there should be no reason to worry about the content of the file.

So, In order to achieve this, Internet Explorer has a property called Trusted Sites. It basically allows you to add the sites which you trust. And it would automatically set a lower level of security to those websites. This means you would be able to use all the features of the website and freely download files.

Trusted Sites can be added easily to your browser. I have listed some sites which would guide you on how to add one.

Kaby Lake is the codename of the New Processor from Intel. Intel is known to produce high quality processors for years. Unlike the processors which were released previously by Intel, this processor only supports the current version of Windows which is Windows 10 and it is not backward compatible with the previous versions of Windows.

Kaby Lake will natively support the Usb 3.1 . It is the latest standard for data transfer between devices and is supposed to be fast.

The Kaby Lake consists of a 14nm semiconductor device fabrication node. The 2015 Apple Macbook and Macbook Pro use the 14nm Intel Processors. The IPhone 6s and 6s Plus which is powered by the A9 chip is built using the 14nm semiconductor developed by Samsung!

It is seventh generation family of Processors which is going to be launched by Intel and probably will be coming out in the 3rd Quarter of this year.